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Much of the real work of the next president will be guiding a transition out of obsolete habits, practices, and expectations that we must shed whether we like it or not. The painful downscaling of the financial services sector, from a bloated 20+ percent of the US economy back to something more in the 5 percent range, is only the first of these agonies. The transition away from suburbia — our tragic misallocation of resources in an infrastructure for daily life with no future — will be even more harrowing because ofÂ the psychology of previous investment, which will provoke a misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, and squander our dwindling resources in the process.

I reject the label “gloom-and-doomer” where these difficult transitions are concerned. There’s a lot about the way we live now that is disgusting, degrading, demoralizing, and socially toxic — from our suicidal diet of processed fat, salt, and corn syrup byproducts to the spiritually punishing everyday realm of the highway strip to the fantastic loneliness and alienation of a people made hostage to a TV-consumer nexus of corporate colonialism. We’re done with that. We just don’t know it yet.